Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is a communication protocol that has continually gained in popularity and continues to be used as the preferred communication protocol for high-speed fiber optic-based communication networks. ATM is a packet-based communication protocol that communicates by transmitting and receiving packets, referred to as “cells.” Each ATM cell comprises a header portion and a payload portion. The header portion comprises five bytes (also referred to as “octets”) of information and the payload portion comprises 48 octets. The header portion contains information that defines the type of ATM cell and the payload. In some instances, the payload portion of multiple cells is combined (typically by concatenation) to form a larger packet. Such an example is ATM adaptation layer 5 (AAL5), in which a number of cells having like header information have their payload concatenated to form a larger packet. Generally, ATM is a connection-oriented protocol, which employs what is referred to as a “virtual channel connection” (VCC), over which communication data traverses between network endpoints, which are referred to as “customer premises equipment” (CPE).
Generally, in ATM, a segmentation and reassembly (SAR) function is performed to segment the communication data into ATM cells at the source end and to reassemble the ATM cells into communication data at the destination end.
Unfortunately, segmentation and reassembly of ATM data requires significant processing resources and is difficult to perform in real-time. This situation is particularly troublesome when attempting to test, troubleshoot and gather statistics in an ATM network.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a way to accelerate the processing of ATM data during cell segmentation and reassembly.